


Going Native

by equestrianstatue



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Ancient Rome, Does it count as voyeurism if God is watching?, M/M, Missing Scene, One Night Stands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-10
Updated: 2019-06-10
Packaged: 2020-04-24 06:34:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19167763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/equestrianstatue/pseuds/equestrianstatue
Summary: Aziraphale smiled very politely at the nearest waiter. “A jug of wine from the north-eastern slopes of Quintus’s vineyards, if you’d be so kind. The yield from eight years past. If you have it.” He turned back to Crowley. “A very peculiar thing happened to this batch— it’s full of all these little bubbles. Nobody seems to know why, but it turns out to pair terrifically well with oysters.”Crowley rolled his eyes, but since he was wearing sunglasses, nobody saw him do it.





	Going Native

It is sometimes stated that God came to Ancient Rome in the year 380 AD. This is, if not strictly incorrect, certainly misleading.

What people mean when they say this is that the worship of God— that is, _the_ God, AKA the Almighty, née Yahweh, etc, as opposed to the broader pantheon of divine beings the Ancient Romans had nicked from the even Ancienter Greeks— got a significant bolstering in Rome in 380 AD, when Christianity became the go-to religion of the Roman Empire. What with Christianity being pretty big, generally, on God.

Obviously, this ignores plenty of people who had been busy worshipping God in Rome for a very long time before 380 AD, both Christians and Jews, both with and without the occasional and temporary deterrent of being fed to lions.

It also ignores the fact that exactly who is worshipping the Almighty, and where those people happen to be, has nothing at all to do with where the Almighty _is_.

God, of course, is eternal and omnipresent. It would therefore be far more accurate to say that God had been in Ancient Rome ever since a bored she-wolf decided to raise a couple of human children for a laugh several centuries earlier, and Ancient Rome had got round to being founded. Or, indeed, that God has been and will continue to be in all places on Earth, at all times, ever since deciding to create the planet on a bit of a whim six thousand years ago.

Not really on a whim, you understand. Even God’s whims are part of Her ineffable plan.

It would also be more accurate to stop talking about Ancient Rome and start calling it Terribly Modern And Cutting Edge Rome, which, at the time, it was.

And so it was that in Terribly Modern And Cutting Edge Rome, in 41 AD, on a Friday, God was everywhere. This included Petronius’s new restaurant, where, tucked away at the far end of the serving counter, an angel and a demon were sharing a platter of oysters. Or rather, the demon was resting his chin on his hand, waiting for the angel to stop talking about four thousand years’ worth of regional varieties of oyster preparation so that they could start eating them.

“And that,” said the angel, Aziraphale, “is why a perfectly griddled oyster should never be overlooked. People will tell you that you ought to eat them raw or not at all, and there’s an authentic simplicity to that, I grant you— but it’s here, with a just a little more time and preparation, that we experience the art.”

“Art?” said Crowley, the demon. “In food?”

“Art. Craft. Care. It’s what makes eating such a delight, knowing that a human being has put a little bit of their soul into it.”

Crowley raised his eyebrows. The effect was something like two elegant millipedes stretching themselves across a marble floor.

“Oh, not literally,” said Aziraphale. “Soul-eating, obviously, is much more in your line of work.”

“Since when has eating been in your line of work, anyway? Bit ‘earthly pleasures’, I’d have thought?”

“Well, it’s not work, strictly speaking.” Aziraphale’s lips pursed in thought. “Though if you want to do a halfway decent job of guiding human beings towards the light, a little assimilation doesn’t hurt. It’s rather tricky to deliver them from evil without any idea of what being a human is actually like.” Aziraphale picked up the nearest oyster, considered it with a vaguely benedictory gaze, and then ate it. “Eating seems a harmless enough way of getting the idea.”

Crowley poked experimentally at one of the oysters with a long, pale finger. “Never really seen the point of eating, myself.”

“Never seen the point! But you were drinking, weren’t you?”

“Drinking is different. Drinking is _fun_. Eating just seems like a waste of time, really. Time that could be spent, I don’t know, tempting, or cavorting, or drinking. In fact, why aren’t we drinking?” Crowley clicked his fingers in the air, and every member of staff in the restaurant found themselves turning attentively towards him. “A jug of house brown over here.”

“There’s not— ” Aziraphale lowered his voice, as if he might be embarrassed, or attempting to save the embarrassment of someone else. “—There’s not really a ‘house brown’ in this sort of place.”

“No?”

Aziraphale smiled very politely at the nearest waiter. “A jug of wine from the north-eastern slopes of Quintus’s vineyards, if you’d be so kind. The yield from eight years past. If you have it.” He turned back to Crowley. “A very peculiar thing happened to this batch— it’s full of all these little bubbles. Nobody seems to know why, but it turns out to pair terrifically well with oysters.”

Crowley rolled his eyes, but since he was wearing sunglasses, nobody saw him do it.

“My dear fellow,” Aziraphale was saying, “How sorry I am that you’ve been missing out on all this. You ought to have a raw one first, really. Here. Just a squeeze of lemon. It needs nothing else.”

Crowley picked up the oyster, squeezed a slice of lemon over it, tipped it into his mouth, and swallowed it.

“Well?”

“Not bad,” Crowley admitted.

“Excellent. Now try this one, with the sauce.”

And so the two eternal beings went on to introduce various forms of external matter to their temporary earthly bodies. This continued for a couple of hours, during which time the external matter of the oysters was entirely consumed, but the external matter of the wine continued to be introduced. Whether they knew it or not, this was consistent with the typical behaviour of humans on Friday nights, and was a useful example of assimilatory practice.

“Your temptation go well, then?” Aziraphale asked, refilling both of their cups from a fresh jug.

“Hmm?”

“You’re in town for a temptation, didn’t you say?”

“Oh, that. Hasn’t happened yet.”

“Anyone interesting?”

A small, crooked smile slid across Crowley’s face. “Ah. Good try.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not going to go leaking classified information like that. Not just in time for you to step in with a convenient bit of grace and scupper the whole thing.”

Aziraphale sat up a little straighter, looking affronted. “I wasn’t trying to trick you. I was just interested.”

“Forgive me my suspicions, but that is literally your job, isn’t it? To combat my diabolical wiles?”

“ _Part_ of the job,” sniffed Aziraphale. “It’s not all about you lot, you know. There’s plenty of other divine work to be getting on with, without having to clean up your messes.”

“Pray tell, if you’ll pardon my Gaulish.”

“Oh, you know the sort of thing. Blessings, miracles, protective watches. Spreading a general sense of goodwill.”

“Christ, that sounds boring.”

Aziraphale tutted. “Bit soon to be blaspheming in the name of the Son of God, don’t you think?”

“Oh, it’s been eight years, get over it. I’m sure the Almighty has, the rate She seems to be cracking through these tests of humanity. They’ll be fighting over any old cup the poor bloke might have touched next.”

“Hmm,” said Aziraphale, looking slightly awkward. “So tell me, what is it a demon gets up to when you're not tempting?”

Luckily, Crowley had by now drunk enough not to notice even as ungainly a change of subject as this one. He shrugged. “It _is_ mainly tempting. Though I’m starting to think there could be something in environmental meddling.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why put all that effort into working on one human at a time, when one freak weather event can throw a whole town into disarray? You only have to get a couple of days into a heatwave before they start taking it out on each other. They get so confused and angry when they’re too hot.”

“Goodness, that’s clever,” said Aziraphale, and then, “and despicable, obviously.”

“Is it? I thought you’d prefer that. Surely it’s not even doing anything wrong, if you’re just letting people exercise their free will over each other?”

“It is if you rig the circumstances beforehand. It’s not exactly free will any more.”

“Oh, but it is. Not my fault if they were created with such an uncanny ability to piss each other off.”

Aziraphale sighed, smoothing down the folds of his toga in his lap. Then he reached for a small bowl of olives slightly further down the counter. When he looked up, Crowley was watching him.

“Don’t you ever get lonely?” Aziraphale asked.

Crowley said, “I’m sorry?”

“Down here— or up here, I suppose— all by yourself, most of the time, and thinking that humans are so terrible?”

“I didn’t say I thought they were terrible. I think they’re brilliant. They make my job ever so easy. And the ones I get to hang out with are a lot more fun than yours, I bet. Say what you will about Caligula, but the man knew how to throw a party. No, what do you mean, lonely?”

“Well, they don’t stick around for very long, do they? Oh, I know, now and again the ones the Almighty’s particularly keen on make it into the hundreds, but that hasn’t happened for ages. Nowadays it’s here today— ” Aziraphale clicked his fingers, causing a pleasantly harmonic ringing in all the glass vessels throughout the restaurant, “—gone in a few decades. Sometimes it feels futile even trying to make friends.”

Crowley smiled his widest, wickedest smile. It was difficult to tell whether this was intended to be sinister, or enticing, or if he had no intention behind it at all. “Demons don’t have friends,” he said. “They have victims.”

“Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” said Aziraphale, starting to eat the olives.

The concept of the _dramatic_ — a word that had evolved quite recently, relatively speaking, from the Greek _δρᾶμα_ , meaning _an action_ , and that from the Greek _δράω_ , meaning _I do_ — had been having something of a heyday over the past few centuries, in, as you might have guessed, Greece. The Athenians in particular had gone a bit mad for it, and had been churning out comedies and tragedies by the bucketful in honour of Dionysus, the Greek god of theatre, who conveniently also happened to be the Greek god of going a bit mad for it.

Both Aziraphale and Crowley had in fact attended the very same Dionysia in Athens almost half a millennium earlier, although they hadn’t known it, where they had seen _The_ _Bacchae_ take first prize. Or rather, Aziraphale had seen both the play and the prizegiving, and Crowley, who had slept in, managed to pick up the gist of the plot at the afterparty. They had both liked it, Aziraphale as a jolly good piece of theatre and what he took to be a warning against excess in any direction, and Crowley as a useful handbook on mass chaos-mongering. Plus, he understood that near the end someone got turned into a snake. The portrayal of Dionysius the god, all-powerful yet fixated on the opinions of humans, ever-travelling, capable of terrible deeds and of consuming desires, had greatly interested them both, although they couldn’t have said why.

Euripides couldn’t have been further from Aziraphale’s mind when, at Petronius’s chucking-out time, Crowley suggested they might as well take another jug back to his. Crowley had taken a room at what looked from the outside like a perfectly unremarkable travellers’ inn, but upon climbing its rickety staircase and pushing through a wooden door, the top floor opened out rather improbably into what a couple of millennia later might have been called an _executive suite_. There was a scattering of minimal but tasteful furniture, an excellent view of at least three of the seven hills of Rome, and a very intricate mosaic depicting Pluto listening to the song of Orpheus.

“And you sleep in this,” Aziraphale said, with interest, peering at the frame of the bed that sat underneath one of the windows. It was made of a very dark, very rich mahogany, nearly black. The wood was inlaid with an intricate gold pattern which, when Aziraphale touched it with one finger, shone almost imperceptibly brighter.

“Obviously.”

“You think eating’s a waste of time, but you enjoy… becoming unconscious? For hours?”

“Yes?” said Crowley, looking slightly confused. He was sprawled across a couch furnished in the same sable-and-gold, watching Aziraphale potter curiously around the room. “Have you not tried it?”

Aziraphale shrugged. “Once or twice.”

“And?”

“It didn’t really do anything for me.”

Crowley frowned, just a little. “Do you not ever want to just stop, for a bit? Have a rest?”

“Why would I want to stop doing the Lord’s work?”

“I’m sure I can’t imagine. And I’m sure you can’t either.” Crowley stretched, sat up, and plucked a dark-tinted cup from the small table beside him. “How about you stay here tonight, then? Prove me wrong. Sleep on that, look me in the eye tomorrow morning, and tell me you don’t feel at least a century younger.”

“You’d have to take your glasses off,” said Aziraphale, mildly. Then, clearing his throat, “Anyway, no, of course I won’t. Leave myself vulnerable to a demon for hours on end? Are you mad?”

“Possibly,” said Crowley, and drained what was left in his cup. Then he cracked his jaw, flicked his tongue out over his lips, and said, “All right, then, angel, how about it?”

“How about what?”

“Stay here and don’t sleep,” Crowley said. “If you prefer.”

“What would be the point of that?” said Aziraphale, and then, moving abruptly away from the bed, “Oh— _oh_. Certainly not. I mean, no, thank you.”

“Come on. I’m bored, you’re bored. I’m drunk, you’re drunk. When in Rome, you know.”

“When in Rome _what_?”

“When in Rome, do as…” Crowley couldn’t quite remember. “Just do as you feel, I think.”

“That’s certainly not how things work on my side,” said Aziraphale, primly. And then, “Why on Earth would you even— ”

“On Earth,” Crowley interrupted. His teeth glinted. “Exactly. Nobody would ever know.”

“That’s utterly beside the point.”

“Is it?”

“Of course it is. It would be— wrong!”

Crowley shrugged. “Humans do it,” he said.

“Yes, but that’s different.”

“Why?”

“They don’t know any better. And they need to… procreate. I don’t. _We_ don’t.”

“But you have the equipment, don’t you?”

Crowley’s eyes travelled some way down from Aziraphale’s face, until Aziraphale’s ears turned very pink and he adjusted his toga. “Well, _yes_ , but— ”

“What’s that for, then? If you’re not supposed to try it out?”

“It’s just sort of… decorative, isn’t it? I don’t know. I’ve never really thought about it.”

Crowley looked at Aziraphale with an expression so disbelieving it was visible through his glasses. Then he said, “Yes, you have.”

Aziraphale chewed at his bottom lip, and glanced away. “Even if I _had_ thought about it, it’s... Well, it’s a test, isn’t it? To not use it?”

Crowley gave a hoot of astonished laughter. “You’re kidding me. Isn’t the Almighty content with testing humans every other bloody century? At it with the angels now too?”

“It’s good to have boundaries,” said Aziraphale, not sounding completely and entirely convinced.

Crowley, who had been twirling his empty cup in his fingers, set it back on the table. He said, “But you must have been tempted.”

“No,” said Aziraphale. “Of course not. That’s your line.” Then, suddenly, he looked very seriously, rather drunkenly annoyed. “Oh!” he said. He raised a finger to point, outraged, at Crowley. “How dare you!”

“What?”

“ _I’m_ the temptation, aren’t I?”

“You’re the what?”

“ _I’m_ the quick temptation,” said Aziraphale, stabbing his finger in the direction of his own chest, just to hammer the point home. “ _I’m_ what you’re in town for. Well, more fool you, it hasn’t been quick at all! And besides, it’s not going to work.”

“Oh, no,” said Crowley, shaking his head and waving a hand in front of his face. “No, you’re not. Coincidence, honestly.”

“A likely story.”

“And if you were, I’d be bound to point out that this has been tremendously quick.”

“Corrupt an angel, would you? A real feather in your wing.”

“It would be,” Crowley agreed. Then he said, “Distract a demon. Not a bad feather in yours.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Think about it. Let’s say you succumb to my… designs. Temptation accomplished, tick, successful trip to Rome for me, off I trot. _But_ ,” Crowley said, the corner of his mouth quirking upwards, “there’s no human soul as collateral. And that’s got to be worth some points on your side, hasn’t it? That’s a soul saved by proxy. That’s a big tick for you too.”

“Are you suggesting,” said Aziraphale, “that we… collaborate?”

“We both file our separate reports. In broad brushstrokes, of course. No need to go into the details.”

Aziraphale fiddled absently with the golden-winged clasp at his shoulder. Then he said, “That’s exactly what you would say if you were trying to tempt me.”

“No, it’s not,” said Crowley. Gazing up at Aziraphale from the couch, he drummed his fingers slowly against his bent knee. “If I were trying to do that, I’d say that you might enjoy it.”

Aziraphale looked somewhere that wasn’t Crowley’s knee. “I don’t think so. No, I definitely wouldn’t. I can’t think of a less appealing prospect.”

“I could make you feel good, angel. So by definition, that couldn’t be Bad, could it? If it was Good?”

“I think you’re getting into semantic ambiguities,” said Aziraphale. This didn’t sound quite as definitively disapproving as he had hoped.

Crowley said, “I can do some very weird things with my tongue.”

“All right, stop,” said Aziraphale. “Enough. Stop tempting.”

Crowley stopped. They looked at each other.

Aziraphale said, “We’d get found out.”

“No, we wouldn’t. When did you last hear a peep out of Head Office, honestly? They’re going to be wrapped up in this bloody Golgotha fallout for ages, your lot _and_ my lot, mark my words. Bet you they’ve all forgotten where we even are.”

Aziraphale said, uneasily, “But the Almighty is omniscient.”

“Oh, come on, that’s just spin,” said Crowley. “Listen, I may not have known the Almighty particularly well even In The Beginning— but I can promise you that there is _nothing_ God is paying less attention to right now than us.”

On this point, Crowley was wrong. God, who, as Aziraphale had pointed out, was omniscient, was paying exactly as much attention to them as to every other concurrent incident on Earth, which was to say, Her full attention.

If a human being were to be kissed by an angel— which had never happened before, Aziraphale being the only angel who had spent enough time on Earth for this to have become a practicable possibility, and for whom it had remained a theoretical one— they would have experienced a sensation not unlike the sunlight of a warm summer afternoon on their skin. They would have been enveloped by a pervading aura of bliss, calm, and safety, a little like lying in a sweet-smelling meadow, letting their fingers trail lazily through a stream of water by their side.

If a human being were to be kissed by a demon— which had happened more times over the previous four thousand years than anyone had bothered to count, not all of which were attributable to Crowley, although he had been pulling his weight— they would have experienced a sensation not unlike the rush of blood to the head upon executing a particularly athletic handstand. This would be followed by the sort of feverish, adrenaline-spiked excitement that comes of swerving dangerously in and out of the path of Death, and the attendant recklessness to go with it.

If an angel were to be kissed by a demon, or a demon were to be kissed by an angel— which happened for the first time in the history of the universe on the top floor of an inn in Rome, in 41 AD, very late on a Friday night— these two supernatural sensations would in fact cancel each other out, making the experience on both sides much like a normal human kiss. Which was to say that it involved a touch of the first sensation and a touch of the second, though neither so strong as to be entirely overwhelming. Or at least not if you hadn’t drunk several jugs of wine between you, and then suddenly sat up or bent down to kiss each other very quickly.

“Ah,” said Aziraphale.

“Hmm,” said Crowley.

They did it again.

By the time the end of Friday night had taken it upon itself to become the beginning of Saturday morning, they had done it several more times. There had also been various other related incidents that would go on to be omitted from both sets of dispatches the following day. It would have been difficult to explain in a memo— although, actually, probably easily recognised by whoever was reading it— that, for a demon, there is an indescribable and inexorable pull towards an angel falling into any state of iniquity, which explained why Crowley could not tear his eyes from the sight of Aziraphale’s face, and the way his mouth had fallen open, when he hitched aside his robes to let Crowley slide two hot fingers inside him. Or, moreover, that for an angel there is an equal and opposite pull towards a demon that can be made to fall in any way under the angel’s power, which explained why Aziraphale was so very keen on the low, growling, wanting sort of noise that Crowley made whenever Aziraphale put his mouth anywhere on his skin.

By the end of this exchange of interests, Aziraphale was lying on his back across the bed, his body flushed rather more pink than golden, and his eyes fluttered closed. Crowley, who had slithered down to sit on the floor, tipped his head back against the edge of the feather-stuffed mattress, breathed out, and dropped a pair of broken sunglasses on the tiles.

“Yes, well,” said Aziraphale. “I suppose I see why humans get so wound up about this.”

“They _do_ get wound up,” Crowley agreed.

“It’s all so stupid, really. Lots of— parts. And so messy.” Aziraphale, however, made no move to do anything about any of the mess, miraculous or otherwise.

“That’s humans for you,” said Crowley. He glanced up and over his shoulder at Aziraphale on the bed, who still had his eyes closed. “You’re going to fall asleep.”

“I am not.”

“Whatever you say.” Crowley looked at him for a moment longer. “You’re not quite as penitent as I expected.”

Aziraphale mumbled, “I’ll get to that later.”

Crowley’s eyes, though Aziraphale couldn’t see them, were flickering with a sudden focus, ink-black and yellow. His shoulders undulated just a little, unconsciously. “Oh!” Crowley said, sounding shocked enough that Aziraphale finally looked at him.

“What?”

Crowley pushed himself to his feet and pointed at Aziraphale, who blinked up at him from the bed. “You planned this!”

“What are you talking about? I think it’s very clear that _you_ tempted _me_.”

“Which,” Crowley said, “is exactly what you knew I would do. Who sidled up to whom tonight, hmm? Of all the cities in all the human civilisations in all the world, you had to manifest in mine. There I am, minding my own business, and before I know it it’s all, ‘Come to Rome often?’ and ‘Try this fizzy wine with an oyster’— ”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Oh, don’t pretend you don’t know. And now, if you do get found out, it’s _my_ fault. ‘Honestly, Gabriel, I fought as bravely as ever against the temptation of sin, but just this once I was bested by the wily forces of Hell’? That’ll play a lot better than ‘I wanted to get my end away so I picked up the nearest lonely-looking demon in a bar’, I’d have thought.”

“Don’t be so stupid,” said Aziraphale, frowning. Sitting up on the bed, he had begun trying to rearrange his toga into something approaching decency.

“Oh, you’re _good_. Or Bad, I suppose. No, you know what you are?” Crowley said, his face cracking into a grin. “ _Human_. Getting what you want and blaming someone else for it? That’s absolutely classic human.”

“As if,” said Aziraphale, now sounding quite annoyed, “I’d risk my entire career for— whatever that was. And I don’t know why you’re suddenly trying to shift the blame. What are you so embarrassed about? I don’t suppose you’re realising that your lot might not look wholly favourably on this either if they found out the details?”

“I’m not embarrassed! I’m a demon! This is what I do.”

“Exactly!”

Crowley folded his arms. “Fine, then. Let’s not do it again.”

“Obviously not.”

“In fact, no need for us to cross paths for a while, I’d have thought.”

“Quite so. I wouldn’t be surprised if we could avoid running into each other altogether.”

“Apart from for thwarting, occasionally.”

“Only very occasionally.”

“And from a distance.”

“Good,” said Aziraphale, who, even if he didn’t seem to look quite as effortlessly holy as he had at the beginning of the evening, no longer looked utterly debauched. He stood up. “So that’s settled. And, like you said, it’s a good job nobody will ever need to know anything about any of this.”

“Amen,” said Crowley, and then, as if the word had left a bitter taste on the back of his tongue, “Ugh.”

Crowley held out his hand, and after a moment, Aziraphale shook it.

Whether the angel had bested the demon, the demon had bested the angel, or nobody had bested anybody, was, in fact, entirely immaterial— despite this seeming like it might be a point of some consequence in the ongoing struggle between the forces of Good and Evil. But when it comes to the Almighty’s ineffable plan, intention is of significantly less importance than anyone tends to suppose. What actually matters is the _action_ , the occurrence, the thing that happens. Whether such an action appears to be purely accidental, or the end result of careful preparation, has no bearing whatsoever on its place in the will of God. And so it was that certain events in Rome, in 41 AD, on a Friday night (and Saturday morning), took their predestined place in the chronology of the universe, as the Almighty watched on, unblinking.

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed this story, you can also reblog it [on tumblr](https://justlikeeddie.tumblr.com/post/185502716082/going-native-equestrianstatue-good-omens-tv)! Or just come and yell at me about how much this show has ruined my life!!!


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